Regular readers know that we at the El Reg Bootnotes bureau are big fans of alternative units of measurement, so we'd like to raise a pint today to South African engineer Danie van der Spuy, who recently quantified the amount of water passing through the sluice gates of the Bloemhof dam as the equivalent of "609 elephants every …

lordy

Surely...

5 boring metric tonnes of propellent is 1.087 elephants? Assuming of course the average elephant tips the scales at 4.6 metric tonnes, but even if that 4.6 is british tons the figure is still only ~1.07 elephants.

re: 609 elephants per second

Too confusing!

You can't use elephants as a unit of liquid volume - elephants are a unit of time. If you remember "Gregory's Girl" the geek photographer/voyeur kid makes it clear that one elephant corresponds to one second (he counts 'one elephant, two elephant' etc)

So that would make the dam handle 609 elephants per elephant...or is that elephants squared?

Precisely

Six hundred and nine elephants per elephant can be annotated as 609 elephant². In other words, by establishing the relationship between mass and time, you begin to demonstrate the concept of acceleration, and if you keep working on this you'll find that an infinitely small piece of elephant can quickly reach phenomenal speed, which is how light gets about so quickly.

are you sure?

"which is how light gets about so quickly"... or could it be that light is merely a gazillion sub-atomic elephants bouncing all over the place at their natural velocity... and whilst sub-atomic... that'd explain why light slows down when transferring between mediums... we'll, they gotta pause to make sure they don't fall in any sink holes!

African

best units ever?

_Nothing_ will displace my choice of Best Units Ever: "Acceleration measured in furlongs per square fortnight" (first seen in an '80/90s computer mag as an example of "you stored the values in units of <x> but the user wanted to see them in units of <y>")

Milli-Helen

Surely that should be a milli-Helen, not a micro-Helen which is a millionth of a Helen. i.e. the amount of beauty to launch a thousandth of a ship, otherwise known as the level of beauty outside a nightclub in Ibiza at 4am...... :-)

I can beat that

If we assume a photon moving at the speed of light has energy (and therefore by e=mc squared) mass, a single photon with a wavelength of 400nm moving past you would have, according to my calculations 1,656 yoctoelephants per second (i.e. 1.656 x 10 to the power of -27 elephants) :-)